It's dead, Jim

[unixronin]

Further to the previously mentioned saga, by last night the restored whitestar was acting erratically again, and by this morning it's unbootable.  My initial suspicion was correct; the disk is definitely losing data.

So now I get to figure out if there's any way I can run Seagate's requested seatools on it (I'm guessing not, because I'm guessing the tool is Windows-only and requires MSIE), and get the drive RMA'd.

Comments

Seatools

[ewen]

There is an "other OS" version of Seatools which IIRC is a bootable CD image and from memory I've successfully used it before. As you suspect there's also a Windows specific version which is presumably prettier, but the "other OS" version should be more than sufficient for RMAing. I've also been fairly successful in RMA'ing disks which are failing when the SMART data shows repeated errors (large number of checksum failures, relocated sectors, etc).

Ewen

Re: Seatools

[unixronin]

Yes, I found the bootable ISO and got a test code out of it. It confirms both that there are unrecoverable bad sectors on the media and that the disk is intermittently dropping off the bus.